Pearl Harbor, Waikiki Beach
Kai’s making a painfully slow adjustment to the Hawaiian time zone. Our first night he was up at 2:30AM, and the past two nights he’s gotten up at exactly 4:20 AM. So far I’d say it’s a relaxing vacation, but not exactly a restful one.
After the sun finally came up and we had our $2.99 breakfast specials, we hopped on the bus to Pearl Harbor, about an hour’s ride away in Central Oahu. We started at the USS Bowfin, which is a retired diesel submarine. They allowed full access to the control room, torpedo rooms, etc., so Kai enjoyed operating the multitude of knobs, switches, and levers. Then we went to the USS Arizona Memorial (the Arizona was one of the battleships sunk at Pearl Harbor). First they had
us view a 25 minute film on the Pearl Harbor attack. I actually found this much more informative and moving than the Memorial itself. I was particularly impressed with the quality of it: making a short film on such an important and emotionally provocative historical event is not an easy task. I thought it was accurate, informative, and respectful. I have to say I didn’t have much of a reaction to the Memorial itself. My only other experience with a war memorial was the Vietnam Memorial, which did provoke a lot of feelings in me. It may be that seeing such a well made film first simply drained the impact of the USS Arizona Memorial.
Having visited two ships already, Kai was ready to move on, so we did not visit the USS Missouri (the ship where the Japanese signed their surrender documents). So we headed back to Honolulu and spent the rest of the day at Waikiki beach. This is the tourist beach in Honolulu: the shore packed with pasty folks getting sunburns, and the water filled with newbies falling off surfboards. We figured we had to check it out at least once.
After getting cleaned up at the condo, we grabbed some take out food and headed back to Waikiki Beach for it’s once-a-week free hula show. It was actually more fun and less cheesy than I thought it’d be. It was a mix of traditional and modern Hawaiian music. I had a passing familiarity with modern hula music, but I’d never heard the traditional style before, which I found much more compelling. See the short video below to get a sense of it.
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